As you know, we are in the middle of a Hospital Expansion Project. Included in that expansion is increasing the size of our Emergency Room, so we can add 6 new beds. One of the challenges of expanding vs building new, is how you keep services open while expanding. So the challenge for this weekend was to figure out how we could continue to stay open and serve patients, while we had to tear down an existing wall in the ER. So Operation Temporary Emergency Room was organized. Matt Woodley, an ER doc, who has been with us for over a year now and Mr. Francis, our ER supervisor, came up with the plan of how we could use our Outpatient Clinic and the rooms there as our Emergency Room. They got everything organized and moved over this past Friday afternoon.
The Project guys worked Friday afternoon and evening and Saturday to build a temporary wall with plywood and then took sledge hammers and knocked down the cinder blocks to open up the old ER into the new ER. There will still need to be some inside work to finish to make it useable, but we are close to having the capacity for 6 new ER beds in our emergency room, which will help our patients and our staff immensely.
While the Project guys were tearing things down, our nurses were doing their best to keep people together in our Temporary Emergency Room from Friday afternoon through most of Saturday. I was on call on Friday night and got to help care for a few of the patients, but our nurses were doing most of the work. It took us longer to care for the patients who came, because despite having everything we needed, we had to figure out where everything was located. So it was challenging at times, but we got it done and now we are back to the regular ER again this Sunday morning.So Operation Temporary Emergency Room was a success, now there is a few weeks of work remaining on the new side of the ER before we will have those extra beds to start seeing patients.
